


The Complete Idiot's Guide to Life After Absolution

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5735617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's acceptable that she would want to be involved in training a new generation of Jedi, and that she'd want them to understand the fine, difficult balance that must be achieved between Dark and Light. Much less understandable is Master Rey Kenobi's desire to drag Ben Solo into this process. But then, he misses the fact that he serves as a very good model of how such painstaking self-mastery might eventually be achieved: that, and it's kind of amusing to watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Complete Idiot's Guide to Life After Absolution

**Author's Note:**

> This sprung up from a discussion about what they could possibly do with Ben Solo if his character survives the trilogy. Not this, I'm sure, but it was fun to write anyway.

…

Their dealings with him are both brisk and informal, the condescending yet affectionate sort of tolerance one might show towards a large, dim-witted and occasionally incontinent pet. It’s a rather unexpected variation on the theme of being handled like a live proton bomb. 

He’s not certain which one is worse. 

“…All right, all right. I’ll let you try one more time.” Sanjan’a shouts this to him from across the courtyard. Her bright red eyes are shut. “What number am I thinking of now?”

“Twelve,” Ben lies. The accurate response would be eleven and five-eights, lit up in phosphorescent pink, but he generously rounds this figure up. “Is that correct?”

“No, wrong. So wrong. It’s, uh, it’s fourteen.” She looks between the other two youngling students who sit eating their midday meals around her. “You see? I told you. No Sith Lord’s ever getting himself all twisted up in _my_ head.”

Uht picks a last cloudberry from his bag to throw at her. “That’s only because your fat skull blocks out everything.”

The berry leaves his hand: but it halts in midair, leaps away as though seized by a strong draft of wind, and Rey leans back to catch it in her mouth. 

Uht flushes red with irritation, a color that spreads up to the roots of his curling horns. The two female students laugh against their sleeves.

“Master Kenobi, I wanted to eat that! It was mine!”

“Hmm-mm.”  Rey chews noisily, sitting as far away from Ben as the bench they share will allow. You could plot a grave in the space between them. “Tell me something – would an attachment like that one probably help you, or hurt you?”

“I don’t know.” Uht sighs with his whole body and flops down onto the damp grass. “Hurt, I guess.” 

“Well said. And Sanjan’a, your skull is exactly as hard as we’d like it to be. Thank you.” She selects a berry from the handful in her own palm and sends it to Uht with an easy, underhanded pitch. “I’ll admit these are very tasty, though. We didn’t have much fruit on Jakku.”

“Right, since you said everything’s so dry.” Uht sits himself up again. “What’s a desert look like?”

“Imagine an ocean and change all the water out for sand.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad.” The third student, Nox, scratches at her close-shaved hair. “Then you’d be able to walk on it, wouldn’t you?”

…

(“ _‘Why should I?’ Ben Solo, is that really what I just heard you ask?”_   

Mother had propped her elbows on the desk and laced her fingers together, a senatorial pose that decided Ben’s fate before she’d even finished speaking. He still finds it mildly hysterical that she ever considered politics a feasible career for him.  

_“And if we’re going to be pedantic, the terms of your exile require that a Jedi Master declare you a neutralized threat – and I could do for a good laugh or two these days, couldn’t you?”_

_“I’m apoplectic with delight already, General.”)_

Rey, upon whom the title ‘Master Kenobi’ still hangs like an untailored robe, is significantly less amused and declares it a horrible idea. Ben concurs. 

 _(“Just see if you can stop yourself from killing this next batch, will you?”_ She doesn’t look at him as she says this. He wouldn’t expect her to.  _“The thought of stabbing you isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be, but I’m still up to the task anytime you are.”_

_“I wait upon your invitation, Master.”)_

_…_

There are currently three of them, younglings whom his uncle has sensed and sifted from among the other war refugees taking sanctuary on D’Qar.

Sanjan’a is the oldest, a female Chiss with blue-black hair and a blaster scar that covers her whole right shoulder and neck. The resulting contracture means she must always carry her head at a slight, inquisitive tilt, but she asks enough questions to disguise it. 

Uht – pronounced _“ooh-t,”_ he frequently corrects, like that sound you make when you’re either amazed or feigning sympathy – is a Zabrak whose mother brings him from a labor camp in the Unknown Regions. His horns curve the wrong way and he stands somewhat shorter than his classmates, despite earnest pleadings to trade in the new legs their engineers have given him – cybernetic, below the knees – for a longer and more imposing pair. 

Nox is a human so silent and light-heeled and prone to being tripped over that Rey makes a bell out of discarded food tins and ties it around the girl’s wrist. She appears simply as EU–7791 in the now-expunged stormtrooper recruitment database, which lists its children by serial number, but has thus far rejected Finn’s attempts to explain that ‘Equinox’ isn’t exactly a real name either. She says it sounds pretty. 

The children have each been told on stark, unequivocal terms who Ben is, or was.

Their newly-informed opinions therefore maintain that he is far too old stomp around wherever he walks, that he’s unnecessarily tall and should find a chair that fits him, that his mother is very nice but a little bit scary, and that the First Order cannot possibly be the same omnipotent monster they have hated all their lives if this one unhappy, breakable man was its greatest and most terrible soldier. 

In short, none of them are especially impressed. 

“…But aren’t you ever worried about all the people who want you dead?” Uht swings at a seeker droid when it whirls busily past him. They practice with staves welded together from the Resistance base’s old plumbing system. “Because you used to be – ”

(Unless Ben’s ears are failing him, they’re also making the requisite whooshes and hums of a live lightsaber under their breaths. He ignores it.) 

Sanjan’a knocks the droid down and sends it spinning with one hard-jawed strike. Nox bats it in return like a volley. 

“If I were you,” Sanjan'a says, “I’d say they should get in a line. That’s how Mama handled noisy customers on ration day. That way they’d only be able to try killing you one at a time.”

“A sensible solution.” Ben stoops to pick the droid up, beats a loose panel back in place. It gives a perfunctory beep. “I’ll bear it in mind for the future.”

“And if you do everything right,” Nox offers, rocking up onto her toes, “you only need to die once. That’s what my – that’s something the captain used to tell us.”

“Well, that was silly of him.”

“Her.

“Her. It’s still silly. Who ever heard of somebody dying  _more_ than once?”

Rey stands supervising them with her saber drawn and lit. She laughs so loudly at this that the sound echoes.  

“It happens more often than you’d guess,” she says. “Right, Master Skywalker?”

She means this as a joke, her tone playful and feather-light, but the words still spark against something inside him like a knife on flint. A taste of iron floods his mouth. 

Before Ben can bear witness to what he’ll do or say next, however, Rey’s mind reaches out to pluck the droid from his hands. It goes flinging towards her. 

Then there’s a flash of blue, a dramatic flourish that burns its lemniscate shape into the air, and he watches Master Kenobi cut the solid piece of alusteel into four even quarters. The students set up an admiring coo at this distraction as though it’s a fireworks display. 

Rey drops into a curtsy, her eyes fixed on his in challenge. 

Ben holds his breath for the five measured beats it takes her to straighten up again; then he breathes out, in, out several times more while none of them are looking, and eventually the effort opens a space of blank clarity in his head. 

“…Master Kenobi,” he gestures with a steady hand, “that was a perfectly good Marksman-H combat remote you just destroyed. We don’t have an infinite supply.” 

“My apologies. I couldn’t control myself.” She flicks a thumb to switch off the lightsaber. “Speaking of control, Nox, hold that weapon lower – no, like this. With both hands, nearer to your waist. That’s a basic position for Form Six combat.”

“How come?”

“It allows you to alter your approach more easily.” Ben summons the clean-sliced droid back into his hands. He presses it together so that the separate pieces are invisible. “Most duels will depend upon how well you can improvise.” 

…

It’s a hopelessly foolish endeavor, Ben thinks, but at least it means not having to sit in an underground prison with only himself as company. Almost anything would be preferable to that. After all, Ben Solo has not been completely alone inside his head for more than fifteen years. 

He finds almost everything just where he’d left it as a boy, and so everything has been changed by its mere stasis. 

He will attempt to take refuge in some old memory, each one curling and blackening around the edges when he touches it like paper held too near a fire. He can’t decide whether he feels mostly pity or hatred for the solemn-mouthed boy he remembers in such exacting detail – a boy who traced out constellations on the ceiling and then pretended to change fate by rearranging them, who made up the rules of dejarik as he went along because Chewbacca always let him win anyway, who went into the garden and tore up flowers while his parents argued, who liked hiding places small enough that maybe the inexplicable, unworded hugeness of his own sorrow and anger couldn’t follow him. 

 _(“That’s a soft heart lying to you, boy. There is no place in this universe a man can go to hide from himself.”)_  

That was back in the beginning, when the voice was patient and kind and indulgent. It had taken years for him to realize that Snoke would always come and go exactly as he wished, and never-never-never when Ben asked or demanded or begged. 

_(“I can’t lay the blame solely with you, of course. Weakness such as this is usually an inherited quality – even your grandfather succumbed to it, momentarily, for all the worthy dedication he showed in life.”_

_“Then what can I do, Master?”_

_“Nothing, by yourself. What we can do together is a different matter.”_ )

…

“…Wow, what happened to your hands? Did you get in a fight? General Organa said fighting’s not allowed here, not unless the other person starts it.” 

Nox points to him as she asks this. She ought to be meditating right now, something Ben was never very adept at because life was always a great, deafening-bright thing that happened all at once. 

“What’s she talking about?” 

The other two open their eyes as well. Rey frowns. Sunlight and shadows coming through the branches overhead make their faces seem to ripple like reflections in a pool. 

“This.”  Ben spreads his hands for the three bent heads to inspect. “It wasn’t a fight. I did it to myself.”

Three fingers have been bruised a purplish-yellow, while several knuckles are split. He’d woken past midnight from a dream about his father and had smashed the nearest object into indecipherable pieces: a wooden stool, as it so happens, which he’d requested for his cell because metal furniture does too much damage when he throws it. 

“What?” Nox blinks. She’s relocated the bell from her wrist to the braided crown of her head, now that her hair has grown long enough. It sounds loud and clear whenever she lifts her chin. “Why’d you do that?”

“I was angry.”

(The dreams aren’t always about his father, of course. 

Sometimes he’ll close his eyes and watch himself kill Snoke, or General Hux who had died laughing. Sometimes it will be the knights, who had defected alongside Kylo Ren because it was their duty to follow him and then died with the same uncomplaining fealty. Sometimes it will be the academy students, who were all about his own age. He will stand in complicit silence as Hosnian Prime erupts to form a new star. 

Sometimes it will even be his uncle, or his mother, or the children who sit before him now, and then the sound of his cracking fists will be what pulls Ben down into the present again. 

It’s never Rey, though. 

Those are the dreams where she makes good on her promise and kills him, instead, which is far preferable – those are the visions where he’ll bow forward, her sword still through his heart, and lay his head to rest on her shoulder.)  

Sanjan’a is still studying his hands. 

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, you know. What’s hurting yourself going to change, when you’re already angry? And what about – what about all _that_? You didn’t do _that_ to yourself too, did you?” ”  

She makes a surveying wave towards him. The clothing Ben wears may hide most of the scars, but not all; one goes down his arm and branches across the bruised hand. 

So here there is a judicious pause, during which Ben recalls Snoke’s lightning as it ignited his skin and a blue lightsaber as it carved across his face. He studies the three children and considers the unprotected rawness of their talent, which occasionally makes him feel as though he’s standing behind a two-way mirror. 

(Rey’s mind shuts him out when he tries to look, though, a sliding horizontal motion as though she’s been caught staring and has flicked her eyes away.)

He folds both hands in his lap. 

“From a certain point of view, I suppose I did.”

…

Occasionally one of the children will begin to cry, during a lesson, cut by the hidden-sharp edge of some vivid and accidental reminder. 

It catches on the other two almost instantly. Their noses will begin to drip, they’ll purse their lips, and Ben thinks they might suffocate on the desperate illusion of self-composure. 

Then Rey will sweep all three of them under her over-sized robes, so that the fabric muffles both their sniffling and any subsequent laughter. She does it stiffly, unaccustomed to the contact, but she always kneels down to draw them in nonetheless.

“Come here, come here,” she says, once. “It’s all right – do you remember what I told you, yesterday? How it takes a very strong person to cry?”

“Yes.”

“I really mean it. We wouldn’t be born knowing how to cry, if it wasn’t something we needed to do every now and then. Don’t you think?”

Sanjan’a nods. Nox and Uht take turns wiping their noses on Rey’s proffered sleeve. 

And there is a uniform, peaceful intensity about her as she says this, like the surrounding hum of a slow-moving ship or the fall of steady rain. 

Ben stands apart to listen.

…

( _“It’s – I dunno. Sometimes it’s scary.”_  

Sanjan’a whispers this to the others, after the lights are out in their mostly-empty dorm. Uht gets top bunk because he likes the elevation. Nox gets bottom because she’s the only one who makes her bed each morning, tucking in the corners with military precision. 

 _“Scary how?”_  

_“You know that feeling you get, when you sit with an open door behind you? I feel that way a lot, but then I look and it’s just me. Or it’s the Force. What’s the difference?”_

_“Master Kenobi says balancing the Force is hardest. That stuff about needing to understand Light and Dark at the same time? She told me she feels it, too. Everyone does. But think about Master Skyw _–_  Master __–__  Ben. Think about him.”  
_

_“What about him?”_

_“Well, he’s scared to death of himself. Haven’t you noticed?”_

_“Sure. But is that because he’s so powerful, or because he’s so weak? I can’t tell.”_

_“It’s both, laser-brain. But if _ _–_ _ if a person like that can come back from all those awful places he’s been inside his mind, and still want to keep being good, it can’t be too impossible for the rest of us.”  
_

_“Really? Who told you that, Nox? I bet you didn’t think it up on your own.”  
_

_“Of course not! It was Master Kenobi _ _–__  she can’t go telling him praise-y stuff like that just yet, though. She says the silly hair makes his head quite big enough as it is.”)  
_

…


End file.
